Former US ambassador and Labour peer joins a long line of people who have gone out to meet awaiting paparazzi head-on
F
or a man at the centre of a storm that has rocked the political establishment, Peter Mandelson has spent the week looking remarkably relaxed. Day after day, as MPs have grilled civil servants over who knew what when about the former US ambassador’s security vetting, and police continue to investigate serious allegations over his own conduct, Mandelson has stepped out of his Regent’s Park mansion and pottered across the road to take his dog for a walk.
Smart-casually dressed in jeans and a jumper and holding in front of him a plastic ball-thrower, he has set off for the park like a weekending solicitor on his way to an egg and spoon race. There have been occasional small smiles for the photographers at his gate, but no comment. The message appears to be: I am insouciant, normal. Not in prison.
Dogs need to be walked, and Jock, Mandelson’s 10-year-old brown and white border collie, is no exception. But the former ambassador could easily have chosen to stay with a friend, or hopped in his car to walk the dog in a different park, or done a Fergie and gone to ground entirely. But “Mandelson’s past record is not to hide away after big setbacks,” says his biographer, Donald Macintyre. “I think his temperament is, ‘I’m bloody well gonna go out there and show them I’m still alive.’ And so here he is, at his highly conspicuous central London pile, in easy reach of every photo agency in the capital.”
